A game of personal historical significance

News via http://thatotherdev.com/2011/05/18/a...-significance/

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2231/...7be8cde3_m.jpg

Here is something old and seemingly random.

According to the earliest file date modified it was first made on or before the 26th of March 2005 and if my memory serves me correctly then this game was the very first piece of original stand alone software that I ever made. It was initially made using DarkBasic and later updated with DarkBasic Pro.

Its a simple first person shooter. You use the space key to shoot and the arrow keys to both move and turn. There are a few boxes that can be picked up for additional health or ammunition. The antagonist is a semi transparent smiley face. Both the ghostly smiley face and your shots pass through the environment without any collision detection. The game shuts down when either you or the smiley face run out of health.

Its worth noting that the title of this game is shitty shooter (which I apparently consistently misspelled as shity shooter). The purpose of it was not to be a good game but simply to be a game of self acknowledged low quality. I’m not sure that I gave it any thought at the time but retrospectively I believe that setting such humble ambitions played a meaningful part in why I’m still making games. Way too many wannabe developers get immediately burnt out by trying and failing to make an MMO. Although that’s not to say that I don’t have my own share of overly ambitious and inevitably abandoned games. You have likely seen some of them and I will likely post more of them in the future.